Could the CDC be trying to tell you and your children what to do with your bodies? Barbara Low Fisher, Co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, wrote an impassioned article in Age of Autism where she discussed the implications of a new move by the CDC to increase its powers to restrict the freedom of a person entering the U.S. or traveling between states if they believe the person is infected or could become infected with certain kinds of communicable diseases.

You could be detained for up to 72 hours against your will unless you agree to be vaccinated. Given the fact that multiple scientists have had research findings that show adverse effects of some vaccines, this could be dangerous for parents who want to the freedom to raise their children as they wish.

David Geier has worked with his father Dr. Mark Geier to determine the efficacy of some vaccines. Through the work of Mark and David Geier, autism and other age-related neurological conditions may one day be an afterthought as they and other scientists continue to uncover the truth about some vaccines. Obviously, there are some obstacles in the way, as is evident by this latest power grab by the CDC, but their research will continue. The public is encouraged to make a public comment to the CDC by 10/14/16.

Did you know the American College Of Pediatricians made a statement warning patients and physicians about the HPV vaccine? They are committed to the health and well-being of children and found that a recommended vaccine could be associated with a very serious health condition of premature ovarian failure in females. The HPV vaccine contains aluminum adjuvants, which is often associated with a number of other vaccines that link aluminum exposure to the possible onset of autism. With that said, David Geier and other vaccine safety supporters believe the statement by ACPEDS may be the push that the public needs to understand the dangers of aluminum exposure.

In the warning by ACPEDS, they found hundreds of cases associated with the HPV vaccine have been linked to premature ovarian failure (POF) post administration of the vaccine. They used the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to find the cases of POF and amenorrhea (missing menstrual periods) following the vaccination. Some females reported the development of the symptoms weeks after receiving the vaccine and others reported them developing several years later. At any rate, the development of these conditions are all being associated with the HPV vaccine and ACPEDS also discovered problems with the initial safety trials of the vaccine.

ACPEDS noted the potential mechanisms of action have been postulated based on autoimmune associations with the aluminum adjuvant used in the ovarian dysfunction. During the pre-licensure safety trials of Gardasil, majority of the test group were taking birth control, which masks the symptoms of amenorrhea and POF. With that said, the safety trials were skewed because in real-world applications, not all women or young girls who receive the vaccine would be taking birth control. That being said, the safety trails didn’t exhibit cases of POF or amenorrhea associated with the vaccine because those symptoms were already being masked by the birth control contraceptive.

With that information in mind, it’s important to understand that the HPV vaccine, specifically the aluminum adjuvant, is being associated with the development of these health conditions. ACPEDS released the statement because the public should be aware of these concerns if they are considering the HPV vaccine until further investigation is taken by regulatory bodies and manufacturers.

Every parent wants the best for their child, which is why many feel as though they need to follow the childhood vaccination schedule from the CDC. Many would assume the immunizations are safe and effective with no need to worry, however, that’s anything but the truth. In fact, certain ingredients found in many vaccines contain dangerous toxins and chemicals that can drastically affect the health of anyone exposed to them. Things like aluminum and mercury are among the risky ingredients that pose a threat to health because research has linked them to numerous adverse reactions. With that said, take a look at these three questions and think about the answers before you decide to vaccinate your child.

Has anyone in your family ever suffered from an adverse reaction?

If anyone in your family has ever experienced an adverse reaction after a vaccination, you should be concerned about the health of your child. This is a question you should investigate because your family’s history can tell you a lot about how your child’s body may respond to a vaccine. Have you ever gotten sick after a vaccination? Is anyone in your family allergic to a specific vaccine? These concerns should be addressed with your doctor before vaccinating and be sure to look into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to view what reactions have been reported following a vaccination.

Do I know of any possible side effects from a vaccination?

Every vaccine is different and contains various ingredients, which means you should learn about the potential side effects each one may possess. Take some time to research the side effects of the specific vaccine your child will be getting by looking at resources online. Additionally, your doctor may have some information to share with you, so don’t be afraid to ask them.

Can I identify an adverse reaction following a vaccination?

Any vaccine can produce side effects and some may be more minor than others. For instance, your child could have a low fever or experience tenderness around the injection site, but do you know how to identify a serious adverse reaction? Things like a high fever that lasts for days, bruising around the injection site, the appearance of pus or moderate to severe pain may be early warning signs of a serious adverse reaction. In the event of such results, you would need to take your child to a healthcare professional immediately to uncover what’s going on.

The Center for Disease Control has made its stance on vaccine safety clear. While many parents and scientists have mounting concerns that vaccines can cause adverse events like neurodevelopmental and autoimmune disorders, the CDC has time and again forcefully argued that these concerns are unfounded, and that there is no evidence of any causal link between vaccines and adverse events.

To prove its point, the CDC conducted its own review of vaccine safety research, and concluded that vaccines posed no risks. A specific focus of the review was the compound Thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative present in influenza vaccines, and which was present in a number of regularly-administered childhood vaccines before it was recommended to be removed from all vaccines in 1999 by the CDC. At the time of its removal, the CDC still insisted that Thimerosal could in no way cause neurodevelopmental disorders, as researchers like Mark and David Geier had argued it could. Rather, the CDC stated that at most, Thimerosal could lead to slight irritation at the site of injection.

However, BioMed Research International has recently released new evidence that suggests the six papers the CDC relied on to conclude Thimerosal was safe were significantly flawed in their methodology. Statistical analyses were inaccurate, and five of the six papers were directly commissioned by the CDC, a clear demonstration of bias considering the CDC has made public its mission to increase vaccinations. In the BioMed Research International paper “Methodological Issues and Evidence of Malfeasance in Research Purporting to Show Thimerosal in Vaccines is Safe,” written by researchers Brian Hooker, Janet Kern, David Geier, Boyd Haley, Lisa Sykes, Paul King and Mark Geier unveil startling evidence that not only did the CDC rely on research based on inaccuracies and poor methodologies, it willingly ignored other existing evidence that showed a connection between Thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorders.

In fact, over the course of 75 years 165 scientific articles have been published by independent scientists around the world that provide evidence of Thimerosal’s toxicity, and 16 of these studies have found concrete, causal relationships between Thimerosal exposure and outcomes like autoimmune reactions, autism, allergic reactions, and even death. It’s clear that the CDC was intentionally selective as to which research it referenced.

While Thimerosal has been removed from the majority of vaccines, as mentioned, it’s still present in vaccines for influenza. This means that millions of children in the United States are exposed to Thimerosal each year, even though it’s now clear that the CDC’s verdict is the result of both inadequate research and bias.

If we can’t trust the CDC to make accurate, honest assessments of vaccine risk factors as concerns Thimerosal, how can we trust their views on other questions that have been raised about vaccine safety, such as aluminum adjuvants or high-frequency vaccination schedules? Ultimately, it seems that though the CDC is tasked with protecting public health, they’re unfortunately doing little in the way of fulfilling this duty when it comes to vaccinations.

The first half of Janet Kern, Boyd Haley, David Geier, Paul King, Lisa Sykes and Mark Geier’s paper on Thimerosal toxicity laid the groundwork for a the relationship between Thimerosal and abnormal sulfation, decreased GSH, and lower cellular thiol levels in ASD individuals. With a nuanced analysis of existing research, Kern et al. pointed out that Thimerosal has the potential to affect each of the three biomarkers in a negative manner. In the second half of their paper, the researchers discuss this relationship and its connection to autism in further detail.

GSH Availability in the ASD Brain

Though Kern et al. underscored the inverse relationship between GSH levels in the blood and the severity of ASD symptoms, recent research reveals that GSH isn’t just insufficient in the plasma of ASD individuals; it’s insufficient in the brain, too. These low levels are particularly evident in the brain’s cerebellum, which is responsible for the majority of fine motor cognitive performance; this area showed signs of oxidative stress and neurodegeneration. GSH is an important thiol; among its many duties, GSH is responsible for regulating and maintaining a healthy immune system, as well as suppressing inflammation. When our bodies don’t have enough GSH, many processes are disrupted. In short, lower GSH levels make individuals more vulnerable to brain insults. While this relationship is rather clear-cut and reinforced by a number of studies, its connection to Thimerosal was still largely indirect. That is until a recent study proved that GSH concentrations in lymphoblastoid cells (LCLs) from children with ASD were more significantly reduced when introduced to Thimerosal than GSH concentrations of LCLs from a control group of children; the LCLs of ASD subjects also demonstrated increased levels of GSH oxidation than when exposed to Thimerosal, while the control group did not. Researchers of the study concluded that these lower levels of GSH thiols and increased levels of oxidation could hinder the brain’s antioxidant defense and detoxification capacity.

Thimerosal Exposure

Studies have also shown that some ASD individuals and immediate family members have a hypersensitivity to Thimerosal that control groups with no family presence of ASD do; in fact, those with hypersensitivity to Thimerosal only needed to be exposed to 40% of the Thimerosal quantity the control group was exposed to to demonstrate sensitivity.

Consider too, that through Thimerosal exposure via vaccines and mercury in breast milk, infants can receive more than 4.5 times the amount of Hg in their first six months of life than what’s sanctioned as safe by the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and the Food and Drug Administration. Research has shown that even when mercury exposure is at a level the EPA deems safe, cognitive function declines. As Kern et al. point out, the reason for this disparity is likely the fact that the EPA bases its recommendation based on Hg ingestion, rather than injection; Hg injection is shown to result in more adverse effects.

Exposure to Thimerosal in the first year of life is particularly dangerous because infants lack an adequate reserve of GSH; studies have revealed that fetal and infant tissue is more vulnerable to Hg toxicity than tissue from older children and adults. Thus, the time of Thimerosal exposure becomes an important factor in its level of toxicity.

Conclusion

As David and Mark Geier have already shown in research, nothing explains the symptoms of ASD more accurately than Hg toxicity. Ultimately, Kern et al. conclude that the combination of low GSH levels, abnormal sulfation chemistry, limited thiol availability, and redox increase an individual’s vulnerability to Thimerosal, and in turn, their vulnerability to regressive autism. Such would better explain why some ASD individuals experience the adverse effects of Thimerosal exposure more acutely and maintain more severe brain insults. Such also makes for a strong case against the continued presence of Thimerosal in vaccines in the United States and around the world.

Recent research from Dr. Mark Geier and his son David Geier has evaluated two of the most commonly-referenced autism assessments, the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC) and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS), to learn more about their potential similarities and differences. The ATEC assessment relies on information provided by parents, while the CARS, a well-established and widely-validated assessment, offers quantitative information provided by medical professionals. Because the CARS has already proven itself to be an effective and reliable method of diagnosing autism, the Geiers primarily set out to determine if the ATEC was equally reliable by comparing its results to those generated by the CARS.

To conduct an accurate evaluation, the Geiers sought 56 children with ASD to undergo two rounds of assessment; each participant would be assessed using both the parental ATEC method and the professional CARS method. Neither parents nor medical professionals would be made aware of the other’s scores, and for consistency, all of the children were evaluated by the same medical professional.

First, a little more about the CARS and ATEC assessments. The CARS is comprised of 15 different categories, to which professionals assign a score based on their observations of a child; total assessment scores can range between 15 and 60. Scores between 15 and 29.5 indicate that a child isn’t autistic, while scores between 37 and 60 indicate a child has moderate to severe autism. Any score in between reflects the presence of mild autism. While the CARS is intended to be conducted by doctors or psychologists on a single occasion, the ATEC is intended for parents, teachers, and others who’ve observed a child’s behavior over an extended period of time.

So what did the Geiers learn about the ATEC scores as they compared to the CARS scores?

The assessments conducted by parents using the ATEC method actually yielded scores that were significantly correlated to CARS scores. Scores in the Sensory/Cognitive Awareness domains and Speech/Language/Communication demonstrated a particularly high correlation, with correlations of .74 and .72, respectively. Overall, the ATEC assessment scores showed a .71 overall correlation to the CARS assessment scores.

These findings are significant not only because they help validate the reliability of the parental ATEC assessment, but because the ATEC is one of the few autism assessments that takes into account the health and physical symptoms of a child. Even the CARS assessment provides us with little insight as to an ASD individual’s physical symptoms, which explains why the correlation between the two assessments in the Health and Physical Behavior domain was so weak. This means that going forward, parents can feel more assured in turning to the ATEC assessment to derive accurate information about their child’s symptoms, including those other assessments fail to adequately address.

Sometimes scientific evidence isn’t always taken as truth when first presented. We’ve seen examples of such many times throughout history; for example, it took years for the CDC’s 1964 warning that smoking causes lung cancer to be taken seriously. This same aversion to acknowledging health warnings was apparent in case against the pertussis vaccine, which for years was known to cause adverse effects in children and which could have easily been replaced by a safer alternative. Yet it took decades for the government and manufacturers to not just listen, but take action.

The Early Years

The story of the pertussis vaccine and the push for a safer alternative began in the early 1900s, when scientists first began exploring a vaccine that would prevent the spread of the highly endemic whooping cough (also known as pertussis), which killed thousands of individuals each year. The whooping cough is caused by a bacteria that infects a victim’s respiratory system, leading to frequent coughing, irritation and an increased risk for seizures, among other effects. Given the severity of the disease and its ability to easily spread among individuals, the development of a pertussis vaccine was both welcomed and necessary. Development of the vaccine continued throughout the first half of the 20th century.

The Evolution of a Vaccine

By the mid-1960s, children in most states across the United States began receiving the pertussis vaccine. This vaccine included an active, whole-cell strain of the toxin pertussis necessary for creating needed antibodies. This whole-cell version of the vaccine underwent numerous prior alterations before it was deemed acceptable, yet trials of the final whole-cell vaccine still yielded conflicting results regarding its effectiveness and safety.

The whole-cell version of the pertussis vaccine (DPT) also contained high levels of endotoxins, a fact that manufacturers chose not to make public. In 1961 pertussis vaccine manufacturers were explicitly notified by the International Symposium on Pertussis that the current whole-cell vaccines were correlated to significant neurologic disorders in children who had received the vaccine.

As the Geiers have noted, every year since the 1950s, there have been reports published describing adverse effects like seizures and even sudden death among children who received the DPT vaccine. The scientific community and general public gave increasing attention to these findings throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and evidence continued to mount.

In 1979, the CDC even held meetings to determine if a relationship existed between sudden infant death syndrome and the DPT vaccine; shortly after, the DPT vaccine was recalled from a number of states, yet was reinstated immediately after the recall without a specific explanation. The FDA went so far as to issue an apology to pharmaceutical companies for the recall.

All the while, an acellular version of the vaccine, which included a safer, inactive pertussis strain that would reduce the risk of adverse effects, was available for administration. Yet this safer acellular alternative was not produced by manufacturers, who believed the version to be too costly and difficult to market. Meanwhile, a number of countries outside of the United States were abandoning the whole-cell vaccine for safety reasons and instead using the acellular vaccine.

The Push for an Acellular Pertussis Vaccine

It was only until lawsuits were waged against pharmaceutical companies and those like Dr. Mark and David Geier lobbied for government action that changes began to occur. Mark and David Geier had conducted their own research on the adverse effects of the pertussis vaccine and also found a link between the vaccination and convulsions, fevers, and death among children who had received the vaccine. In addition to his research, Dr. Geier also testified in numerous court cases against pharmaceutical companies. Yet Geier and the petitioners he testified for faced a number of challenges from the Department of Health and Human Resources, as well as the professional opinions of researchers conveniently funded by pharmaceutical companies. Despite these obstacles, in 1992 the FDA officially approved an acellular version of the pertussis vaccine for children at 18 months and 5 years and the whole-cell DPT vaccine was removed from the U.S. market by 2001, though it’s still manufactured and sold to buyers overseas.

The Takeaway

As the story of the pertussis vaccine and the Geiers’ experience demonstrate, making a change for the better isn’t always as easy as proving the change is necessary. Often, when research yields evidence unfavorable to government and industry, it can take years, even decades, to shift perspectives and prompt a safer course of action.